What's the sentiment on OS X being rechristened macOS? Doesn't this count as a sort've era 2.5?
back
3 comments
I for one really like this rename for search reasons.
Now it is a single unambiguous word: macos. Where before people used the variations: osx, os x, mac os x. Depending on how smart the search engine was you would either get to few or to many results, eg: github issue search. Some search engines even ignore 3 letter words altogether.
It will take a while of course for everyone to adopt the new name in their writing.
OS X used to be Mac OS X. Branding does not matter a whole lot for the underlying technology.
I feel that there was a pretty big technological change between "Rhapsody" and "Mac OS X", but the other name changes were not accompanied by comparable changes.
There was a big change between Rhapsody & OS X. The mach part was upgraded from 2.5 to 3.0 and the BSD part was rapidly being update. The other addition was the new driver abstraction library as NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP on i386 used Objective C, while OS X uses C++.
I don't think the code ever really sat that dormant, as they were working on 88000 based machines for the NeXTRISC before that was canceled, and sold off to Cannon who eventually shipped a dual PowerPC 601 machine based on the NeXT design that at the time was to include dual 88010's.
There clearly had been some work on PowerPC back when it was first announced as some early code made mention of a MC98601 aka the first gen PowerPC.
yea this headline confused me, because 99% of the world still says OSX when they mean MacOS (by Apple definition).